Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

Advances in Mathematics of Communications

On ideal and weakly-ideal access structures

Reza Kaboli, Shahram Khazaei, Maghsoud Parviz

Published Jun 11, 2021• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

For more than two decades, proving or refuting the following statement has remained a challenging open problem in the theory of secret sharing schemes (SSSs): every ideal access structure admits an ideal perfect multi-linear SSS. The class of group-characterizable (GC) SSSs include the multi-linear ones. Hence, if the above statement is true, then so is the following weaker statement: every ideal access structure admits an ideal perfect GC SSS. One contribution of this paper is to show that ideal SSSs are not necessarily GC. Our second contribution is to study the above two statements with respect to several variations of weakly-ideal access structures. Recently, Mejia and Montoya studied ideal access structures that admit ideal multi-linear schemes and provided a classification-like theorem for them. We additionally present some tools that are useful to extend their result.

DOI
10.3934/amc.2021017

Related papers

Ideal Hierarchical Secret Sharing Schemes

Oriol Farràs, Carles Padró

Hierarchical secret sharing is among the most natural generalizations of threshold secret sharing, and it has attracted a lot of attention since the invention of secret sharing until nowadays. Several constructions of ideal hierarchical secret sharing schemes have been proposed, but it was not known what access structures admit such a scheme. We solve this problem by providing a natural definition for the family of the hierarchical access structures and, more importantly, by presenting a complete characterization of the ideal hierarchical access structures, that is, the ones admitting an ideal secret sharing scheme. Our characterization is based on the well-known connection between ideal secret sharing schemes and matroids and, more specifically, on the connection between ideal multipartite secret sharing schemes and integer polymatroids. In particular, we prove that every hierarchical matroid port admits an ideal linear secret sharing scheme over every large enough finite field. Finally, we use our results to present a new proof for the existing characterization of the ideal weighted threshold access structures.

IEEE Transactions on Information Theory•Jan 25, 2012•69 citations

Secret sharing schemes on sparse homogeneous access structures with rank three.

Jaume Martí-Farré, Carles Padró

One of the main open problems in secret sharing is the characterization of the ideal access structures. This problem has been studied for several families of access structures with similar results. Namely, in all these families, the ideal access structures coincide with the vector space ones and, besides, the optimal information rate of a non-ideal access structure is at most 2/3. An access structure is said to be r-homogeneous if there are exactly r participants in every minimal qualified subset. A first approach to the characterization of the ideal 3-homogeneous access structures is made in this paper. We show that the results in the previously studied families can not be directly generalized to this one. Nevertheless, we prove that the equivalences above apply to the family of the sparse 3-homogeneous access structures, that is, those in which any subset of four participants contains at most two minimal qualified subsets. Besides, we give a complete description of the ideal sparse 3-homogeneous access structures.

•Jan 1, 2003•0 citations

Ideal and perfect multi-secret sharing schemes whose access structure are Q 3

Lv yingli, Xiaojun Xu, Zhang Xiao-feng +1 more

The characterization of access structure is one of the main open problems in secret sharing schemes. We are particularly interested in determining which Q 3 access structures can be realized and the requirement should be achieved even in the presence of an adversary who is able to corrupt some players in an ideal secret sharing scheme. The problems are studied in our paper. Above all, we present a concrete scheme that can meet all above requirements. In our scheme, it is not only a dynamic multi-secret and multi-use sharing protocol, but participants from access structure can recover the secret using their shares, while the same number of participants from adversary structure can't recover the secret using their shares, which is different from general access structure schemes. Moreover, in the whole dynamic process, the coefficients of polynomial and private secret shares always stay the same. Therefore, it enjoys high practical value.

•Aug 1, 2012•0 citations

A characterisation of ideal weighted secret sharing schemes

Ali M. Hameed, Arkadii M. Slinko

Abstract Beimel, Tassa and Weinreb [SIAM J. Discrete Math. 22 (2008), 360–397] and Farràs and Padró [Lecture Notes in Comput. Sci. 5978, Springer, 2010, 219–236] partially characterised access structures of ideal weighted secret sharing schemes in terms of the operation of composition. They proved that any weighted ideal access structure is a composition of indecomposable ones. Farràs and Padró gave a list of seven classes of access structures – one unipartite, three bipartite and three tripartite – to which all weighted ideal indecomposable access structures may belong. In this paper we determine exactly which access structures from those classes are indecomposable. We also determine which compositions of indecomposable weighted access structures are again weighted and obtain an if-and-only-if characterisation of ideal weighted secret sharing schemes. We use game-theoretic techniques to achieve this.

Journal of Mathematical Cryptology•Oct 6, 2015•5 citations

Secret sharing and duality

László Csirmaz

Secret sharing is an important building block in cryptography. All explicit secret sharing schemes which are known to have optimal complexity are multi-linear, thus are closely related to linear codes. The dual of such a linear scheme, in the sense of duality of linear codes, gives another scheme for the dual access structure. These schemes have the same complexity, namely the largest share size relative to the secret size is the same. It is a long-standing open problem whether this fact is true in general: the complexity of any access structure is the same as the complexity of its dual. We give a partial answer to this question. An almost perfect scheme allows negligible errors, both in the recovery and in the independence. There exists an almost perfect ideal scheme on 174 participants whose complexity is strictly smaller than that of its dual.

•Nov 1, 2020•12 citations

A Characterization of Ideal Weighted Secret Sharing Schemes

Ali M. Hameed, Arkadii M. Slinko

Beimel, Tassa and Weinreb (2008) and Farras and Padro (2010) partially characterized access structures of ideal weighted threshold secret sharing schemes in terms of the operation of composition. They classified indecomposable ideal weighted threshold access structures, and proved that any other ideal weighted threshold access structure is a composition of indecomposable ones. It remained unclear which compositions of indecomposable weighted threshold access structures are weighted. In this paper we fill the gap. Using game-theoretic techniques we determine which compositions of indecomposable ideal access structures are weighted, and obtain an if and only if characterization of ideal weighted threshold secret sharing schemes.

arXiv:1308.3763•Aug 17, 2013•0 citations
For more than two decades, proving or refuting the following statement has remained a challenging open problem in the theory of secret sharing schemes (SSSs): every ideal access structure admits an ideal perfect multi-linear SSS. The class of group-characterizable (GC) SSSs include the multi-linear ones. Hence, if the above statement is true, then so is the following weaker statement: every ideal access structure admits an ideal perfect GC SSS. One contribution of this paper is to show that ideal SSSs are not necessarily GC. Our second contribution is to study the above two statements with respect to several variations of weakly-ideal access structures. Recently, Mejia and Montoya studied ideal access structures that admit ideal multi-linear schemes and provided a classification-like theorem for them. We additionally present some tools that are useful to extend their result.
Hierarchical secret sharing is among the most natural generalizations of threshold secret sharing, and it has attracted a lot of attention since the invention of secret sharing until nowadays. Several constructions of ideal hierarchical secret sharing schemes have been proposed, but it was not known what access structures admit such a scheme. We solve this problem by providing a natural definition for the family of the hierarchical access structures and, more importantly, by presenting a complete characterization of the ideal hierarchical access structures, that is, the ones admitting an ideal secret sharing scheme. Our characterization is based on the well-known connection between ideal secret sharing schemes and matroids and, more specifically, on the connection between ideal multipartite secret sharing schemes and integer polymatroids. In particular, we prove that every hierarchical matroid port admits an ideal linear secret sharing scheme over every large enough finite field. Finally, we use our results to present a new proof for the existing characterization of the ideal weighted threshold access structures.
One of the main open problems in secret sharing is the characterization of the ideal access structures. This problem has been studied for several families of access structures with similar results. Namely, in all these families, the ideal access structures coincide with the vector space ones and, besides, the optimal information rate of a non-ideal access structure is at most 2/3. An access structure is said to be r-homogeneous if there are exactly r participants in every minimal qualified subset. A first approach to the characterization of the ideal 3-homogeneous access structures is made in this paper. We show that the results in the previously studied families can not be directly generalized to this one. Nevertheless, we prove that the equivalences above apply to the family of the sparse 3-homogeneous access structures, that is, those in which any subset of four participants contains at most two minimal qualified subsets. Besides, we give a complete description of the ideal sparse 3-homogeneous access structures.
The characterization of access structure is one of the main open problems in secret sharing schemes. We are particularly interested in determining which Q 3 access structures can be realized and the requirement should be achieved even in the presence of an adversary who is able to corrupt some players in an ideal secret sharing scheme. The problems are studied in our paper. Above all, we present a concrete scheme that can meet all above requirements. In our scheme, it is not only a dynamic multi-secret and multi-use sharing protocol, but participants from access structure can recover the secret using their shares, while the same number of participants from adversary structure can't recover the secret using their shares, which is different from general access structure schemes. Moreover, in the whole dynamic process, the coefficients of polynomial and private secret shares always stay the same. Therefore, it enjoys high practical value.
Abstract Beimel, Tassa and Weinreb [SIAM J. Discrete Math. 22 (2008), 360–397] and Farràs and Padró [Lecture Notes in Comput. Sci. 5978, Springer, 2010, 219–236] partially characterised access structures of ideal weighted secret sharing schemes in terms of the operation of composition. They proved that any weighted ideal access structure is a composition of indecomposable ones. Farràs and Padró gave a list of seven classes of access structures – one unipartite, three bipartite and three tripartite – to which all weighted ideal indecomposable access structures may belong. In this paper we determine exactly which access structures from those classes are indecomposable. We also determine which compositions of indecomposable weighted access structures are again weighted and obtain an if-and-only-if characterisation of ideal weighted secret sharing schemes. We use game-theoretic techniques to achieve this.
Secret sharing is an important building block in cryptography. All explicit secret sharing schemes which are known to have optimal complexity are multi-linear, thus are closely related to linear codes. The dual of such a linear scheme, in the sense of duality of linear codes, gives another scheme for the dual access structure. These schemes have the same complexity, namely the largest share size relative to the secret size is the same. It is a long-standing open problem whether this fact is true in general: the complexity of any access structure is the same as the complexity of its dual. We give a partial answer to this question. An almost perfect scheme allows negligible errors, both in the recovery and in the independence. There exists an almost perfect ideal scheme on 174 participants whose complexity is strictly smaller than that of its dual.
Beimel, Tassa and Weinreb (2008) and Farras and Padro (2010) partially characterized access structures of ideal weighted threshold secret sharing schemes in terms of the operation of composition. They classified indecomposable ideal weighted threshold access structures, and proved that any other ideal weighted threshold access structure is a composition of indecomposable ones. It remained unclear which compositions of indecomposable weighted threshold access structures are weighted. In this paper we fill the gap. Using game-theoretic techniques we determine which compositions of indecomposable ideal access structures are weighted, and obtain an if and only if characterization of ideal weighted threshold secret sharing schemes.